Re: OT: Converting miles/km

Le 20/09/2024 à 00:12, Christian Weisgerber a écrit :

>
I'm sorry, I don't know where to post this.  I'm crossposting to
alt.usage.english, because statute miles as a unit mostly afflict
the English-speaking world.

Afflict? Sometimes I wonder how many more times I'm going to hear Germans criticising how we do things.

So you want to convert between miles and kilometers.  The conversion
factor is... uh...  A 40-year-old calculator book provides a useful
tip:  Unless you're designing a space probe, you can use ln(5).
 WHAT?
 Yes, the natural logrithm of 5 approximates the conversion factor
between miles and kilometers; specifically one mile is about ln(5)
kilometers.  It's accurate to four digits.
 If nothing else, it's faster to type on a calculator.
 I think that's hysterical.

I'm afraid I don't see the problem. Just assign 1.609344 to a memory cell. That's what I do. A shortened version is fine for mental arithmetic - better than ln(5) - and if one has forgotten 1.6... but has a calculator, what's wrong with tapping 2.54 x 12 x 5,280 / 100,000?
Simples!